An emerging literature highlights the importance of empowering women. Female decision-making power is typically …

This paper examines how traditional marriage market institutions affect households' financial decisions. We study how … bride-to-groom marriage payments, i.e., dowries, influence saving behavior in rural India. Exploiting variation in firstborn … gender and heterogeneity in dowry amounts across marriage markets, we find that the prospect of paying higher dowry increases …

higher marriage rates for women and lower for men. Land abundance favored higher fertility. The demands of childcare … opportunities outside the home. Frontier women were less likely to report "gainful employment," but among those who did, relatively … more had high-status occupations. Together, these findings integrate contrasting narratives about frontier women …

strongly associated with female labor supply: age at first marriage, marital dissolution, age at first birth, the number of …